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Peter Johnson's avatar

Nice mix of quotations. Glad to see the inclusion of Bly. His "object" prose poems look at the natural world as very few verse poems are capable of. In an interview I did with him, he said the following concerning his object prose poems:

PJ: Specifically, you say that “in the object poem in prose, the conscious mind gives up, at least to a degree, the adversary position it usually adopts toward the unconscious, and a certain harmony between the two takes place.” By “adversary position,” do you mean a poet’s conscious attempt to manhandle or control the object?

RB: Yes. The mind is always tempted to take up a superior position in relation to beings—such as caterpillars or clams—who are without reason. Many philosophers and saints in the West have made efforts to dissolve the adversarial position human beings take toward animals—St. Francis would be one. It’s been slow work. We could say that in a prose poem one can practice writing about an animal or “thing” in a way that wouldn’t be hierarchical, in which one wouldn’t place human beings on top and animals on the bottom. like the way Frost implies in “Two Look at Two” a mysterious sympathy between a human couple and a deer couple. We can feel the lack of hierarchy in Thoreau’s prose as well. So what one ultimately hopes for is a lessening of the empire mentality of the human being, shall we say, a disappearance completely of the thought of inferior races and superior races, a giving up completely of the idea that nature has no consciousness. When some adversarial thinking is cleared away, it’s possible for language to become transparent. For example, when you read one of Ponge’s prose poems, the text, in some way, almost becomes transparent, and one feels one can touch the object itself.

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Sarah Faye Cohen's avatar

Thank you for heeding Edward Abbey's advice: "Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast…a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”

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